Assessment of Antitrust Agencies' Impact and Performance : A Proposal for an Analytical Framework

The assessment of antitrust agencies' impact and performance serves three goals: first, to assess how well competition agencies have done their job; second, to help to correct their future strategy and to improve the allocation of limited resources and, finally, to respond to the need for accountability of public agencies. In this paper, we propose a methodology to evaluate the impact of the interventions of antitrust agencies (e.g. infringement decisions, merger control decisions, advocacy work, etc.). The methodology proposed combines comprehensiveness (including all activities by agencies) and simplicity (through a number of synthetic indicators). The methodology classifies interventions according to their nature and impact measurability and proposes activity, relevance and impact indicators to assess agencies' performance